Around The Bend Movie Review:


Relative chronological standpoint likely determines a viewer’s rooting interest. In current youth-obsessed society, entertainment leans toward a freer younger generation’s winning out while in the process imparting life lessons to its tradition-bound elders. Hence the hoary family fluff standard, fashionably updated of late to encompass issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity or race. Those old enough not to be trusted understandably sit up and take notice when, less often, a film flips the coin to where it is the elderly who have wisdom of their own to impart to offspring.

In either case, the invariably comic result is expected and, despite accompanying ache, life-affirming and lighthearted. Such is the case with Jordan Roberts’ “Around the Bend,” which he first started writing ten years ago as a play about a father-daughter estrangement and, adjusting gender and adding generations, changed through thirty-two “incarnations” to the filmscript partially about his own barely known, absentee father. In his first feature as director, Roberts is smart enough to let his small cast of essentially four veterans, a six-year-old and two dogs, find its own way, while, among other lessons, he himself was learning that, in the future, “No dogs!”

About family and understanding, this happens to be a male film in that the figures are fathers and sons through four generations, seventy-nine years. Women are noticeable in their physical absence though emotional presence -- one wife and mother long dead, another literally halfway around the globe on a trial separation -- with nurse Katrina (Glenne Headly), who loves creaky TV horror movies and dispenses Danish folk wisdom, unnecessary and phased out early on.

For reasons of budget and climate -- “It’s winter in [cheaper] Canada” -- Albuquerque and Las Lunas with its old hospital/training school fill in for L.A., plus other location work at La Cienega and a Zia Native American pueblo. Interspersed with a couple of bare motel interiors, five scenes at Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, and a Southwest sunset or two, the setting inconspicuously reinforces a bareness against which theme and acting are paramount and “the comedy and the drama rise out of the same earth.”

Not the overused bonding of male tailgate parties and roughnecking, but rather the tenderness of love and respect is embodied in the performances. As retired anthropologist eighty-five-year-old Henry Lair and his long-absent and unheard-from son Turner, appropriately stubbly and unkempt Sir Michael Caine and Christopher Walken -- the latter having recently reversed to playing good guys -- do marvels with silences, spaces and gestures while skirting loveable old codger stereotypes. Frail and difficult Henry lives upstairs in the home of his grandson, Turner’s slightly lame son Jason (Josh Lucas), and great-grandson, Jason’s son Zack (Jonah Bobo). Sensing that the end is near and determined not to be shoved six feet into the ground from which he has lifted so many bones, Henry awakens the boy and slips out to a handy KFC to write final instructions on snips of paper, colored Post-it’s and a place mat U.S.A. map.

His action is spurred by the surprising return of Turner, junkie and jailbird, his own unquestioning embrace of this prodigal and Jason’s coldness to the man, the father who disappeared thirty years ago. The instructions are to be read from their fast-food bag and followed in order, mixed ashes to be scattered at determined points in an itinerary that will lead to a stone staircase at 7170 Mariposa. There, if the old man’s plan works, the truth will out in a ritual of reconciliation. Though the precise nature of that truth may vary from one plot to another, the general result is foreknown to us, and so the question becomes, not what, but how this sort of scavenger hunt is conducted, and by whom.

Lower-level banker Jason loves Zack and Henry but will also discover the emotion and courage that coexist with the bad in his own father. This awakening comes from Turner, whose proud spirit dances as Josh’s and Zack’s eventually will and who imparts, for example, a wordless lesson in a jewelry shop; and partly it will come from Zack, eyes as big as a Keane greeting-card waif’s and only two or three times given unrealistic vision and cloying dialogue. With the wisdom of experience, great-grandfather/grandfather/father Henry arranged this final gift of getting beyond error and the past, a coming to grasp those who are physically as well as emotionally dead to us.

Its pathos and humor gentle, and with a rare total absence of flesh or violence, “Around the Bend” is a family movie for adults. If the coda is predictable, and if in retrospect events jigsaw together too easily along the road, the destination -- a redeemer rock, where love blossoms -- is what men hope this is all about.

Donald Levit

 

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